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Powerful Solar Storm Could Shut Down U.S. for Month

H8R

H8R

Cranky Pants
Nov 10, 2004
13,959
35
One solar flair can wipe out every electronic communication in the world. Not just your cell phone service.

Emergency services, banks, food supply chains, GPS, TV, internet, computers, police, fire, rescue, etc etc etc.


It's not just the toys, all the essentials would go down as well.




Stock yer pantry folks.
 
Transcend

Transcend

My Nuts Are Flat
Apr 18, 2002
18,040
3
Towing the party line.
DED DED DED FOX NEWS
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Fox news, terrible spelling, and apocalyptic visions all in one thread.

Holy crap, we have just hit a gold mine.

ps: Some of us care about what is going on in the world around us and like to know. an event of this magnitude would end life as you know it. ALL electronic communications would be down. Emergency services, rail and air travel, GPS which is crucial to shipping, military communications, electricity etc. It wouldn't be a yee haw no cell phones event.

Also, it's fox news. More fear mongering to control the masses.
 
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DamienC

DamienC

Turbo Monkey
Jun 6, 2002
1,165
0
DC
Okay folks, here's the deal. I do space weather-related research and here's my take on that report. I know the authors mentioned in that news clip and they're all very respected leaders in the field. However, the case that they're presenting is very, very extreme - I would lean toward their worst-case analysis as a millenial solar event rather than a 100-year storm. Through the last two solar cycles widespread impacts to infrastructure have not reached catastrophic levels and are mostly anecdotal in nature.

The downing of the power grid in Quebec is the most often cited example of an event that was attributed to a geomagnetic storm. There was also an event in November, 2004 that took down the FAA's Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) for a number of hours. This is the precision navigation system used in civil aviation to augment GPS. Errors in GPS, increased radiation dosage for passengers flying polar routes, and single event upsets in spacecraft due to penetrating energetic particles and spacecraft charging are also effects directly attributed to transient solar activity. The extent and duration of the damage described by this report would be unprecedented.

However, as society increases its dependence on technologies that rely on space systems the more vulnerable we will be to perturbations in the near-Earth space environment driven by the Sun. The underlying message of the report is still valid and merits attention.

Forecasting space weather is still in its infancy and probably a few decades behind tropospheric weather forecasting.
 
Damo

Damo

Short One Marshmallow
Sep 7, 2006
4,603
27
French Alps
So this is happening just in the US&A right?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaa!!




Suckers
 
H8R

H8R

Cranky Pants
Nov 10, 2004
13,959
35
DamienC said:
Forecasting space weather is still in its infancy and probably a few decades behind tropospheric weather forecasting.
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Great. You're already making excuses.

So when Space Katrina hits us and no one is ready for it, you're not to blame? Way to pass the buck there.


:D
 
DamienC

DamienC

Turbo Monkey
Jun 6, 2002
1,165
0
DC
H8R said:
Great. You're already making excuses.

So when Space Katrina hits us and no one is ready for it, you're not to blame? Way to pass the buck there.

:D
Click to expand...
Absolutely...I'm gonna be like the beer looter guy and let someone else take care of it. :happydance:

Operational space weather prediction is monumentally more difficult than terrestrial weather forecasting for a few reasons:

The most obvious one is that the volume of space encompassing the Sun-Earth system is several orders of magnitude larger than the relatively thin shell of the terrestrial atmosphere. In order to drive weather models you need to assimilate mountains of data. Right now space weather model development is data starved. The only region of the system that is approaching being monitored sufficiently (and even then not really) is the ionosphere and that only comprises the first 1000 km in altitude. From that point up until the Sun we only have sparse point measurements for the most part. There are some research missions in space now that I'm working on that aims to get around the last issue but it will be a while before the research is transitioned into operations.

Structures on the Sun that drive space weather events like solar flares or coronal mass ejections (CME) include sunspots and coronal holes. Once these rotate into our field of view and if they produce a flare or CME you have about 8 minutes before the energetic particles (which are traveling at a large fraction of the speed of light) reach Earth. Earth-directed CMEs take about 3-5 days to reach us. So if you're trying to produce a 10-day forecast you really need (1) to be able to see behind the limb of the Sun and (2) be able to calculate the probability that an observed active region will produce a solar flare and/or CME. NASA's STEREO spacecraft are currently the only two spacecraft (three if you count Ulysses) that will observe the back side of the Sun and these won't be there for a while. Plus their research payloads aren't optimized for space weather monitoring.
 
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